


holding on (and not letting go)

by FortySevens



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, First Kiss, Flirting, Hurt/Comfort, Office Makeouts, Post Season 3, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:07:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26685631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FortySevens/pseuds/FortySevens
Summary: “I do have a thought,” Kate says after she comes to the same conclusion that’s been staring him in the face for way longer than he’d like to admit—they just don’t have enough staff.She sits up a little to look at him, “But I also know you, so I’m pretty sure you’re not going to like it.”“Damn it, you really think I’m going to make you wait tables?”
Relationships: Kate Fuller/Seth Gecko
Comments: 42
Kudos: 93





	holding on (and not letting go)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YossarianDawn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YossarianDawn/gifts).



> Shows up four years late to a new fandom with 3k+ words of another post-s3 SethKate fic
> 
> This was supposed to be a lighthearted and fun (and like, somewhere near the 500-word range) prompt response for YossarianDawn, but then I remembered that positioning this three weeks out from Matanzas means that Kate is still dealing with Some Shit(TM), and that needs to be dealt with before Kate and Seth can make out…so…here we are…

“Hey.”

Seth tears his gaze away from the staffing rota he’s been fighting with for the last two hours—who the fuck knew that running a semi-legal truck stop was so goddamn time consuming when your priority wasn’t having to worry about things like sketchy Culebra prophecies and a hell god who’s trying to destroy the world?

Blinking back to the present, he finds Kate standing just inside the door to his and Richie’s office, her red hair scraped back into a messy bun while a sweatshirt—one of his—hangs off one shoulder.

“Hey,” he says after the second that it takes for his brain to remember that she’s not a mirage or a figment of his most desperate hopes. 

She’s really here and really wearing his clothes and she really did just pad out from his bedroom, where she’s been staying ever since he and Richie brought her back from Matanzas three weeks ago. “What are you still doing up?”

Kate shrugs, leans against the wall next to the door, her hands falling in front of her as she fidgets with the hoodie’s overlong sleeves, “Couldn’t sleep,” she doesn’t meet his eye, looks off at some spot on the floor between her and his desk. 

It’s more or less her new normal with most people these days. Not always with him, but it looks like tonight is one of those nights. 

Nights where she’s not entirely sure which way is up, what’s real and what isn’t, and how it is she got to where she was to where she is now.

He’s doing his best to help her, and even the littlest progress is better than nothing, even if it feels like it can’t possibly be enough.

This is his penance though, for bringing her into this situation in the first place. For drawing her in, forcing her and her father and brother to stay with them at the Twister even though there was a part of him that _knew_ there was no reason to keep them once they were safely in Mexico.

“I figured I’d see what you were up to instead of lying in the dark, staring and at the ceiling,” her bare shoulder rises, then falls back down—it’s more than a little distracting, and he curses himself a little for letting his mind go there when she’s still healing. “What are you working on?”

He glares at the tablet that’s been mocking him since he finished doing the rounds downstairs with Richie, who’s off—fuck, he doesn’t know where, and it doesn’t matter.

Probably getting a _bite_ to eat.

“Just trying to figure out staffing—it’s a pain the ass when half your crew got skullfucked and you’re trying to rebuild.”

Kate winces, and Seth curses under his breath. 

_Fuck_ , it feels like he’s been accidentally setting her off left and right since they got her back.

“Which is _not_ your fault, Princess,” he says, making get up and make her look him in the eye, but then she does and nods once, carefully, and this might be a better night than he first thought if she’s coming out of it this quick. “We had to go through the same shit when we took over after Malvado bit it. It’s not really that much of a big deal.”

“Well clearly it’s not _fine_ ,” Kate gestures to the tablet he’s been scowling at for way too long. “I should probably let you get back to it.”

Before she can make for the door like he knows she wants to, to scurry back to his room and sit in the dark like she thinks she deserves, even though it was _Amaru_ messing around in her skin and not the other way around, Seth rolls his chair back a little to make room for her.

“Or I could use a fresh set of eyes on this.”

Stopping short, Kate nods, flashing him that little pleased half-smile like she did the first time he called her his partner.

“Pull up a chair then.”

But instead of going for the overly ergonomic monstrosity of a chair pushed behind Richie’s desk, Kate rounds his, pushes him back a little with a flat palm on his shoulder—he goes without protest, mostly because his brain has shut down in, _holy shit_ surprise—and slides right into his lap.

It’s not the first time they’ve sat like this, Kate curled up on his lap, the palm of his hand coming to her back to keep her steady, but this is the first time they’ve done this in the light of—well, in a room with the lights on, and not after a demonic-fueled nightmare that’s scared her witless.

She barely weighs a thing, and even less so now—she’s eating a meal and a half at most these days, which is a step up from the barely a half of a meal she’d been able to keep down during the first few days after Matanzas.

He’d never seen so much _blood_ mixed with vomit in his life—not even in the shitty horror movies Richie would make him watch back when they were kids.

It was _bad_.

Seth makes a mental note to grab them a snack when they’re done untangling this nightmare that is trying to staff Jed’s for the next three weeks.

By the time he gets his shit together and returns to reality, Kate has kicked off her slippers and propped her heels on the side of the chair. Her heels push back against his thigh while her whole side from shoulder to her bent knees rests against his chest.

“I think you’re trying to distract me, Princess.”

“I would _never_ ,” she fires back without skipping a beat, curling in and tucking the crown of her head against the snakebites on his neck. He can feel them tingle against the heat of her hairline. “So, what’d we got?”

It takes a second to drag his thoughts away from the entire lapful he has of Kate Fuller, and he stretches his arm around her knees to pull the tablet closer to the edge of his desk so they can both see it, “That’d be this mess.”

“Yeah?”

“Kalinda and Greer want to go on some girlie weekend getaway shit down in Mobile next week, which would be fine if it was just Kalinda—I can live without my assistant for three days,” Kate snorts and he retaliates by digging his fingers into her side, making her squirm which—okay, maybe that was not the _best_ idea ever with her sitting on his lap.

She grabs at his fingers, yanks them away from the soft spot under her ribs, but doesn’t let him go, so maybe it actually _was_ one of his better ideas. 

Is it more than a little pathetic that he’s pretty much always trying to find an excuse to hold her hand? 

Probably.

Does he give a shit?

Fuck no.

“Thing is, I need Greer or we’d be down two servers for the Saturday night, Sunday morning marathon.”

Jacknife Jed’s get a pretty steady stream of customers in at all hours thanks to their placement just off the highway, but the late-weekend hours are always their busiest.

Kate hums, and he feels it in his chest, “That is a problem,” she muses, her gaze flicking from one side of the screen to the other, from the list of the available staff and the slots Seth has been trying to fill in a way that won’t make the rest of the waitstaff come together in revolt during their busiest part of the week.

But what she doesn’t do, is let his hand go.

Seth’s pretty sure that Kate has no idea she’s toying with his fingers as she stares at the computer screen, her fingernails rhythmically scraping back and forth over the calluses on his thumb.

It’s really, really nice though, so he’s going to let her keep that up.

(Pathetic. He is so goddamn pathetic.)

“I do have a thought,” Kate says after she comes to the same conclusion that’s been staring him in the face for way longer than he’d like to admit—they just don’t have enough staff. 

She sits up a little to look at him, “But I also know you, so I’m pretty sure you’re not going to like it.”

“Damn it, you really think I’m going to make you wait tables?”

Kate rolls her eyes, “I can barely get through six hours without having a panic attack, of course I’m not,” she squeezes his fingers in reassurance like _he’s_ the one who needs it, not the girl who has multiple panic attacks each day because she spent eight fucking months held hostage by some hell bitch in her own goddamn body.

“All right Princess, what’s this brilliant idea you got? At this point, I’m open to anything. Well, anything that doesn’t involve _me_ waiting tables. I don’t do service jobs.”

“Call Kisa.”

“You’re right. I don’t like that idea.”

Again, Kate rolls her eyes, “Hear me out. You—or Richie, yeah, it should probably be Richie—needs to call Kisa. Ask her if she’s picked up any wayward Culebras on her never-ending cross-country adventure who are in need of a job. They come, Jed’s gets to be fully staffed for the busiest night of the week, _and_ we get more and more Culebras who see Jed’s as a safe place, a haven, rather than the fear-ridden mess it used to be when Malvado was running things. Kisa gets to continue being the best _La Diosa_ the world has ever seen, you get more loyal staff to boss around, and Kalinda and Greer get to take a well-deserved vacation. Everybody wins.”

“Loyal to the _queen of snakes_ ,” he grumbles under his breath.

She jabs at his chest, “You and I both know Kisa’s people are loyal to us too. You wouldn’t be okay with me being here if that wasn’t the case.”

Damnit. 

She’s got a point there.

“Plus,” she says, sounding infinitely amused, which means Seth knows he’s not going to be a fan of what she’s going to say next. “Richie gets an excuse to call his long-distance girlfriend.”

There it is.

Seth scoffs, “Damnit Katie. You gotta quit barking up that tree.”

“I’m not barking up any trees, I’ve got eyes. You’re just weird about it.”

“For good reason!”

“You know you’re going to have to get over it eventually. They’re not going to wait fifty, sixty years until you bite the big one before they get back together. Richie loves you and understands how badly everything went down after the Twister, but not that much.”

“A man can dream,” he grumbles, even as he pushes aside thoughts of what his life could look like that far down the line, something he’s never allowed himself to think about before.

Especially not any potential futures with any specific _people_. 

Like specific people currently sitting on his lap.

And at this point, he really doesn’t even care what Richie does with the Snake Queen. He just—is very happy to avoid acknowledging it for as long as humanly possible.

Kate goes quiet as she resettles against him, curls up into an even tighter ball on his lap, and he looks down to find her staring at the hand that’s not still grasping his, her fingers slowly curling and then uncurling on her lap.

It’s another one of those things she’s been doing, pretty much since the moment they got her back. 

Especially in moments of calm, moments of silence, he’ll find her staring down at her hands, curling them to fists and opening them back up, over and over and over again.

Like she’s proving to herself that she can.

That she’s in control, still in the driver’s seat.

The first time he saw her do it, crammed in-between him and Richie as they escaped Matanzas in a pickup truck that definitely had seen better days, it broke his goddamn heart.

He squeezes her fingers, nudges their hands into her side to get her attention, “Come on Kate, what’s going through your head?”

“I’m just so tired, _all_ the time,” she pinches the bridge of her nose as she squeezes her eyes shut. “And I’m _so_ tired of _being_ tired. When does it end?”

Tightening his grip on her hand, Seth hooks his other arm under her knees and pulls her closer, if that’s even possible—even if it isn’t, it makes him feel better. 

“Look, you walked out of hell three weeks ago, and I don’t care if you were down there minutes or hours or months, that’s not going to be easy to shake,” she winces, and he _knows_ she hates thinking about it, hates talking about what happened, but he has to say this. “And none of that even takes into account all the shit that’s happened to you in the last two fucking _years_. I don’t care how long it takes for you to figure out what your new normal is. Give it three months, give it three years, hell, three hundred fucking years, I don’t care how fucking long it takes. You take as much time as you need, and I’m going to be right next to you as long as that’s where you want me to be.”

She twitches against him, and he knows he said a _lot_ , but he doesn’t know which part pulled this reaction from her.

“Why?”

Kate’s still looking down at her lap, and he nudges the side of her head with his chin, but she still won’t look at him.

“Why what?”

“What would you—why would you want to do that? I’m a mess, Seth. I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, I can barely look at myself in the mirror. I lose it at the drop of a hat. Why are you tying yourself to that? Is it guilt? Because this was always going to happen to me, whether you and Richie kidnapped us from the Dew Drop Inn or not. I know that now. So, you don’t have to take responsibility for the mess that the lords and their gods threw me into. I don’t need you to do that when there are so many other things you could be doing right now without me.”

Seth reaches up, curls his fingers under her chin and tilts her head up to finally look at him, “Kate, it’s not about taking any responsibility,” the look on her face tells him she doesn’t believe that, and he shakes his head firmly. “I’m serious. It’s not that. I can feel like shit about pulling you into this mess _and_ still want to stay with you. You _know_ why I want to. You saw everything.”

Finally dropping his fingers, Kate presses her palms to her face, hiding from his gaze again, “I _know_ ,” she says, almost like a whine. “I just—I don’t know how to talk about it.”

“Because it’s been _three weeks_ —this is not the shit you need to be worrying yourself about right now. I can be patient.”

Kate’s head pops up, an exaggerated furrow to her brow and stares at him for a long beat, “I’m sorry,” is what she finally comes out with. “Did you have a _personality transplant_ while I was gone?”

He gapes at her, because this is the first time she’s _joked_ about this whole mess, and can’t help the laugh that bursts from his chest, joyful but just a little bit pained. Seth cups a hand over the side of her head and presses his mouth to her hairline just above her temple, before resting his forehead against that spot, “Fuck, I missed you, Kate.”

It feels like some of the tension has leached its way out of her as she nudges back against him, grabs his hand and laces her fingers with his, “You really sure this is the right thing?”

“Fuck yeah, I am,” he says without hesitation, burying his nose in her hair. “We tried the whole separation thing. I thought it was the right thing to do to keep you safe, but—it’s _not_. And even if it was, I don’t want it. You, right here with me, is always going to be better than the alternative. And I know I fucked that up the first time, that I have a lot to make up for and I still don’t understand how you can forgive me for that, but this is it.”

Kate sits back a little so she can look him in the eye. He’s not sure what she’s looking for, but lets her, his heart stuttering a little in his chest when she cups his jaw in her hand, her thumb taking one slow stroke over the stubble he’s been growing out.

“Seth,” she sighs, but says nothing else.

There’s nothing else to do but kiss her, so that’s what he does, using the hand still curled in her hair to tilt her head up, gently pressing his mouth to hers. It’s the best goddamn thing he’s done in his pathetic excuse of a life, and already he wants nothing more than to do it again.

Kate makes this sound in the back of her throat—somewhere between a sigh and a moan—and he tightens his grip on her hair as he deepens the kiss. He slides his tongue over the fullness of her bottom lip and she opens up for him, and this, this is the best thing he’d never allowed himself to hope for.

Her tongue brushes softly against his, and when she slides her hand up his jaw into the shaved-short hair at the nape of his neck, her blunt fingernails trace absent patterns that send bolts of heat through his skin. A moan sounds in the back of his throat, and he’d be embarrassed if it didn’t feel so goddamn good.

When she shifts against him, Seth groans and holds her tighter, his hand sliding over one knee, fingers digging into the softness of her inner thigh, warm through the thin leggings she’s taken to wearing now that it’s getting colder at night.

Kate pulls away with a whimper, but doesn’t go far, her chest heaving as she catches her breath. Seth eases up on his grip on her thigh as she brushes her nose against his, “This okay?” He murmurs, his mouth barely a breath away from hers.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, still breathless and sounding a little dazed, but she still ducks back in to press her lips to his softly. “I do want this, Seth.”

He strokes his thumb in small circles behind her left ear, delighting when her lashes flutter and her breath hitches. Leaning in, he kisses one corner of her mouth, and then the other, “I know,” he says, kissing her again because he can’t fucking help himself. “But you’re still healing. I’m not going to rush this. We don’t have to, and I don’t want you to think you have to for my sake.”

She nods against him, “I know. I know, I just—”

“You may not believe me, but I _can_ be patient. I know how to run the long con.”

Her brow ticks in the direction of her still-vibrant hairline, “Is that so?”

“It is,” he says before she kisses him again, and he loses himself in her mouth and in the yielding press of her body against his for a long minutes, because how could he not?

When he pulls away again, Kate is breathless and bright-cheeked, “So,” she says, kissing his cheek, his jaw, and the spot in front of his ear. “How’s this long-con supposed to go down then?”

“Well first I’m going to kiss you again,” and he does just that, slow and lush, his tongue curling around hers, like they have all the time in the world. “And then we’re going to grab a snack, head back to our room and put on a movie so you can fall asleep.”

Her eyes go dark when he says, _our room_ , and Seth barely knows what to do with the feelings building up in his chest.

“And then what?”

Seth strokes his fingertips just a little higher up her thigh, and Kate squirms a little, but doesn’t stop him, “Then you and me, we take things one day at a time. Figure it out together. Maybe take a trip to the beach to get away from this mess for a little bit. Leave it all in Richie’s hands for a while.”

There’s something like surprise playing on Kate’s face, and she tilts her head a little, “You’d do that?”

He pulls his hand from her hair and cups it over her cheek, “You’ve been through _hell_ , Kate,” he says as she nuzzles his palm, brushes her lips against his skin. “The way I see it, you get to do whatever the hell you want. You want to take a trip, we’re going to take a trip. That simple.”

Kate buries her face in the curve of his neck, “ _Seth_ ,” her hand slides down to the collar of his shirt. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“Remember what you said at the gate?” She stills against him, but nods after heaving a deep breath against his neck. “Redemption in the eyes of—it goes both ways, Kate.”

He curves his arm over her back when he hears and feels her breath hitch in her chest, “We’re going to get you through this,” he says, against the crown of her head. “I’ve got you.”

Kate sniffles, pulls back enough to swipe the sleeves of his sweatshirt over her eyes, and cups his face in her hands, pulls him down to touch his forehead to hers, “And I’ve got you.”

“You got that right,” he kisses her, quick. “You and me, partner. Come on, let’s go get that snack.”

“Don’t you have to finish—” Kate trails off with a tilt of her head in the direction of his desk.

Seth pats her hip, “Consider me sufficiently distracted, and with a _very_ keen understanding of my priorities,” she wrinkles her nose and he kisses the spot between her brows where they furrow together. “I’ll tell Richie to deal with the staffing issue tomorrow.”

She darts in to kiss him again, “I like that plan.”

“Good,” Seth kisses her back, opening to the soft slide of her tongue against his.

And if it takes them a while before they actually get up to get that late-night snack, well—

No one needs to know.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me over on tumblr at Fortysevens writes. Feel free to prompt me with SethKate plots. No guarantees on how long it'll take for me to write them, but I'll get there eventually!


End file.
